narrator: on this episode of "earth focus," how can we manage, protect, and nourish our natural resources while meeting the growing global demand for food? a model of local control along the coast of madagascar provide a blueprint for ocean sustainability and community building, while in san diego, scalability is the goal as researchers work to build the first open-ocean fish farm in the united stes. [film advance clicking]

man: in madagascar, we have more than 5,000 kilometers of coast, and a lot of fishermen communities. it's forbidden to fish sea cucumber with dive materials to preserve the species. but there are

many foreign investors that came here that pay the young malagasy people to fish sea cucumber with a bottle of gas, etc. the chinese came here and, as usual, they tried to offer infrastructures like roads, and as a counterpart, they want to be authorized to exploit natural resources. there is a very huge upsurge of these practices now, and it's a big threat to the natural resources, to their sustainability, and the environment in general. [man speaking native language]

day: we believe that fish stocks are declining for multiple reasons, one of them being access to international markets. a lot of people in europe, a lot of people in asia enjoy to eat seafood which exists here. the population is growing in madagascar. there's lots of migration pressure as well. people from the inland come to the ocean because they want access to resources on the coast here. people know that their fisheries are in trouble but they have no other option but to fish. there is t enough governance surrounding the fisheries, so, all those factors interlink, result in a decline in the resource. [man speaking native language]

[man speaking native language]

[badouraly speaking native language] [ratsimbazafy speaking native language]

[badouraly speaking native language]

[applause] day: lmma's now in madagascar. we have over 100. so, this is being really thought of as a low-cost and efficient solution to managing marine resources because all over the world, the oceans are overfished. small-scale fishers have very, very few rights. they have the same problems.

[ratsimbazafy speaking native language] [badouraly speaking native language] >> [shouts in native language] [rasolonaina shouts in native language]

[indistinct conversation] day: so, the sea cucumber project, we're working in partnership with a local collector that also produces juveniles. so, they sell juvenile sea cucumbers to farmers. they look after them and then sell them back. [indistinct conversation] day: they lease a pen and they have a series of different rights and obligations. [siren] [rasolonaina speaking native language]

day: farm exists in the pens and once the juveniles come to an adult size, they get taken away to be sold, mostly for the asian market. [rasolonaina speaking native language] [film advance clicks] day: this is probably one of the most transformative activities for communities. so, just to give you an idea, many people here will make about 120,000 ariari per month, and they will be making up to 400,000 now farming

sea cucumber. [siren] [rasolonaina speaking native language] [indistinct conversation] razakamanarina: i hope this country will have the vision and the priorities to manage sustainably its natural resources. the vision for development to get rid of this corruption and to decentralize power and resources.

[ratsimbazafy speaking native language] [badouraly speaking native language] narrator: in madagascar, the villages of velondriake have found that local marine regulation are pushing people towards a sustainable future of aquaculture, while in san diego, california, innovation is outpacing federal laws and threatening the local fishing

culture. [film advance clicks] [indistinct conversation] man: i grew up fishing. i made my first tuna trip when i was 9 years old. i'd get out of school early, you know, during the

summers to go fishing with my dad, and then my son nick, he loved fishing since he was little, too. man 2: immediately when i was born, like, i knew. like, i didn't think that i was ever gonna do anhing else. i just knew i was gonna be a fisherman. david: rinse him a little. i never even thought about third generation. just a couple of weeks ago, i said, "well, wait a second. we're third generation." you know, i didn't even think about that, and my granddaughter is down here working at the market. that's fourth generation. nick: our goal is to catch the bigeye tuna. the largest bigeye that we can catch is our goal. david: he's been fishing about a thousand miles out for tuna, and a lot of people say, "well, why do you fish a thousand miles?" we're not allow to fish within 200 miles of the beach, our regulations in the united states. nick: it's kind of a struggle sometimes. there's certain restrictions that, you know, really harm some fishermen. david: when we go fishing, like with this boat, we have an observer on the boat 100% of the time, so they mark down

everything we catch. we have certain size mono we have to use. we have to use a certain size hook. we're not allowed to use squid. you know, we're not allowed to use the best bait. we go through all these measures, but these other countries don't. they're ing filet mignon on the hooks, and we're using a hot dog. man: the u.s. is the largest importer of seafood in the world. we import 91% of our seafood, and our primary source is china. comes both at a large environmental cost in terms of the carbon footprint, shipping fish halfway across the globe, and it comes at a financial cost. the trade imbalance in seafood for the united states is $13 billion to $14 billion a year. nick: it seems like it would be a lot better for the american fishermen if we didn't import as much fish.

david: in other countries, they gas the fish, or they actually, you know, dye the fish, basically, so you can't tell, you know, by the color or the smell because it's, you know, been co2 gassed. it's a tough business for us. [film advance clicks] man: good seafood's not cheap. cheap seafood's not good, and you don't really have a lot of time. there's no such thing as a 60-day, dry-aged tuna, so you got to get it, get it off the boat, and get it out there and get it served in restaurants. know your source is huge. we have no frequent flyer miles on our tuna. our fish is coming right off the boat in san diego. we're the first stop from the dock. if it's getting flo in from fiji or around the world, we don't know where it's coming from. there's no trace and trust. trace and trust starts at the dock from the boat. you're

offloading right to the fishmonger, right to the box, and then where it goes. it's the foreign fleet. they have very little rules, very little regulations, no permits, no licenses. they're doing everything wrong, and when the american guys are doing everything right, yeah, it's very difficult for the american fisherman to compete with the foign fish and the foreign pricing that comes into it. man: when i was 16, i learned to scuba-dive. i just love being in the ocean, and then i saw an opportunity to become a sea urchin diver, so i learned to process sea urchins, first in my garage, so i then started diving during the day, processing in the evening, and delivering to sushi bars. i had a couple tough years, but we learned to start buying local seafood. i started buying local lobsters and local swordfish and other local fish, and i started buying out of baja calirnia. i started buying groupers and snappers and scallops out of baja california and diversified

the business. [saw whirring] we buy directly from the boats. we know who we're buying from, and then we take care of the quality and get it to our different customer levels, whether it's a wholesaler in san francisco or whether it's a restaurant here in san diego or an individual who walks in the door. we'll bring the fish back here, and we'll grade the fish one by one, so each fish, we'll do a tail cut, a core sample. we'll grade the fish. uh, number one? this one's a little different. the tail is a little bit off color, but the core nice, so i graded it a 2g with a two plus 4. we have a limited amount of wild fish we can take to keep the population sustainable, and yet we have a growing population in the world, so we need this seafood. there are more imports now. half the

world's seafood supply is being farmed. it's not happening in the u.s. it's happening in another country under probably less strenuous environmental conditions, and meanwhil we don't have it happening in the u.s. because of all our regulations. schubel: aquaculture refers to growing seafood in water. the problem within freshwater, which is where most of it comes now, well, freshwater is going to be under serious pressure as we go farther into this century because of climate change, so we need to be looking to the ocean. we don't have a single fish farm anywhere in the united states in federal waters. at the present tie, there are two applications for permits--one off san diego and one off long island, new york. in an area the size of lake michigan, we could produce an amount of seafood equivalent to the total global wild catch.

[film advance clicks] man: this facility was built to grow juvenile white sea bass to then release back out into the wild to replenish the wild stock. but what we realized over time is, if we put a million fish out in the ocean and we get 10% of them back, that means we got 100,000 fish back out of a million. if i take a million fish and put them in a cage and grow them, i can get a million fish back out and put them on the table. our plan here is to take everything we've learned how to do in growing these species and demonstrate the technology, transfer the technology from the research level out to the commercial level, and to do that, we're

gonna permit a farm to produce 5,000 tons of fish about 4 miles out to sea. now, mussels and oysters, we know how to do that. we've done that for a long time, and we reasonably know how to grow fin fish, but we're not growing it here. we're growing it in other parts of the world and then bringing it here. now we get back into the balance part of it again. does it really make sense for us to have our salmon coming from chile, being processed in china, and then flown into our market? does it make sense for us to have european sea bass grown in greece and then brought into southern california? we had 16 canneries in southern california from los angeles to san diego and were 40,000 people in the tuna industry alone in san diego and in southern california, but now all there is is the corporate offices for those tuna

companies. the processing and the ships, the boats are all in the western pacific now. we've seen the seafood industry in southern california wane quite a bit from when i was a kid, and at the same time, as i mentioned earlier, the world population has tripled, so we're bringing in less seafood, even though the demand is going up and up, so we have this opportunity to grow fish in the waters off the coast in clean, clear water that's not polluted. it's not within a bay. it doesn't interfere with water skiers or kayakers or anybody else, but it'll be out in 200 feet of water in a quarter- to a half-knot current going by, which means that the water stays clean and the biomass of the fish has no impact on the environment, and yet we're still in very close proximity to the market, so the product when it's brought in is harvested and on the dock within a couple of

hours after it's taken out of the cage, which means it's very fresh and ready to go to market. [film advance clicks] david: it's a hard thing because, as a commercial fisherman, first thing you say is, not a good thing because, you know, it's competition for us. but i try to look at, you know, the whole picture. gomes: it's very difficult to say because, as an american fisherman, you take pride in that. there's a tradition and a heritage, and you don't want to lose that. my family's been involved in fishing here for over 130 years, so if you're gonna do aquaculture and you're gonna hire commercial fishermen that are gonna be displaced and they're going to be able to work, i'm all for it, but if you're not gonna hire commercial fishermen, then i have to be against it because you're putting those guys out of work.

rudie: there are good mariculture operations, and there are bad mariculture operations, you know. the good ones, they don't have the high densities, and they're able to keep their densities low and control the type of food they have so they don't have problems with disease or escape or parasites or all the problems that, let's say, the bad farms have. david: you have to be careful that it's not where they put too many fish in and they have to feed--you know, give them antibiotics and all these things, you know, so if it's more of a natual thing and they're, like, getting local sardines or anchovies fm us to feed them, i'm kind of in support of that. kent: it's really in the environment's best interest for us to feed the world to do it in the open ocean, and when we say, "'re not gonna do it here. we're gonna grow it in another country," we're just kind of saying, "we're not worried about the environmental issues as long

as they're not here. grow it any way you want, and we'll just bring it in," and that's not acceptable to me. announcer: "earth focus" is made possible in part by the orange county community foundation and the farvue foundation.cccccv

>> creator gave us what we needed to take care of ourselves, and he also told us, "this is what i gave you. this is what you need to protect." we need this air. we need this ass. we need the trees. we need everything. it belongto all of us, not just one person to go out and harvest and take for themselves, and it's not to be used to get rich and to fill your pockets. >> terra-gen identified monument ridge and bear river ridge as having high potential for wind development. i met with them early, and i expressed concerns about there being native ground ther >> i think, because this project would have been so visible, it would be a constant reminder of how the tribe's land was taken